In July 2025, a quiet but momentous event took place in British higher education. Arden University, a for-profit private institution with more than 33,000 students, was sold-at least in part-to American finance capital. Brightstar Capital Partners, a New York–based private equity firm, paid over $1 billion for a 50% stake and installed Bolivian-American billionaire Marcelo Claure as chair of its board.

The transaction received little public attention. It merited no sustained debate in Parliament, no ministerial hand-wringing, and scarcely a mention in major media outlets. Yet it goes to the very heart of the crisis now gripping British universities. For the sale is not just a financial deal; it is the culmination of decades of policy choices that have transformed universities from communities of intellectual exploration into profit-driven corporations. The implications for education, culture, and democracy could not be more severe.

Arden’s journey reflects the larger story of marketisation in higher education. Founded in Coventry in 1990 as Resource Development International, an online business school, it was sold in 2011 to a US for-profit company. Four years later, it gained university status, and by 2016 it had been acquired by Global University Systems, a Dutch conglomerate with holdings across Europe and beyond.

Now, with Brightstar’s billion-dollar buy-in, Arden stands poised for global expansion. Claure has promised to harness artificial intelligence to translate Arden’s 140 “career-focused” degree programmes into more than 150 languages, allowing UK-accredited degrees to be marketed worldwide. On the surface, this may appear as innovation. But behind the glossy language lies a troubling reality: the commodification of knowledge, the dilution of academic standards, and the abandonment of education’s civic and cultural purposes.

The central issue is not just financial but philosophical. Since ancient Athens, education has been seen as a pursuit of truth and moral cultivation. Universities, from Oxford to Bologna to Harvard, emerged as self-governing communities of scholars dedicated to critical inquiry and ethical reflection.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his seminal 1852 work The Idea of a University, described higher education as the training of the mind to clarity, eloquence, and judgment. John Stuart Mill, installed as rector of St Andrews in........

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